Category Archives: How to

Today at the Realtime Report we developed a WordPress plugin to embed Tweets using the Twitter API. Like this:

[tweet https://twitter.com/OnionSports/status/145262716104351747]

I know that a plugin is available for WordPress.com sites, but I couldn’t find one for self-hosted WordPress. I’m working on uploading our plugin to the WordPress.org repository — in the meantime you can download it here: Modern Media Tweet Shortcode.Update: we’ve uploaded it to the WordPress plugins site. Please download it there.

Instructions are below. Let me know @chriscarson if you like it. Enjoy!

How did a small arts venue go from having no online presence to running an impressive social media campaign, with 20,000 fans on Facebook to show for it, in just three years? Daniel Gallant, the Executive Director of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in NYC’s Lower East Side, discussed the organization’s transformation in the digital space at #RLTM Realtime NY 11 on June 6th.

Back in 2008, the Nuyorican’s only advertising was though print ads and free weeklies, and had no measurable impact. Losing thousands in potential revenue per year, the Cafe had no online presence, and didn’t even know if their events were showing up online or in the press.

Fast forward to 2011: with an up-to-date website, constantly updated Facebook page with nearly 20,000 fans and Twitter account with over 2,300 followers, the Nuyorican is harnessing digital and social media effectively. Via these channels, the Nuyorican posts daily updates, discount offers, cross-promotions, contests, and more. They aim to engage their online audience at least once a day with a ‘morsel’ of information, succinct and interesting messages that have value. Having re-packaged itself as a “cutting edge” arts venue, it has connected with a tech-savvy fan base and has ‘busloads’ of people coming in for shows.

Along with the essentials (website, Facebook and Twitter), the Nuyorican also:

customized their Google Places page (and still update it regularly)

created Google alerts

opened accounts with Google Adwords

publicized their social networking accounts via calendars

kept sending email blasts for older customers

put Facebook and Twitter accounts on everything they produced

The Nuyorican’s ratio of online fans to operating expense is excellent in comparison to other nonprofit competitors in NYC, including the New York City Opera, Kennedy Center, and the 92nd Street Y.

Successes for the Nuyorican following their ‘online overhaul’ include:

growing online ticket sales by 30%, and web traffic by 40%

for social media ‘hyped’ events, sales grew 50%

doubled their number of weekly events

more than doubled annual revenues

cut their advertising budget while boosting public profile

using feedback from social networking to create new programs and more effectively target audiences

reimagined the Cafe’s brand: from edgy but low-tech to cutting-edge and tech-savvy

Our friends at WomenCentric have posted another great Realtime Conference video — this one from last year’s TWTRCON NY 10. Pattie Simone interviews Laura Fitton, who shares some fantastic tips for how small businesses, entrepreneurs and executives can use Twitter to find and develop new, qualified business leads. And, Laura is a Twitter business success case study herself, having used Twitter to become the Founder and CEO of oneforty.com, a venture-funded business.

Managing a corporate Twitter account is like realtime publishing and, just like in the magazine world, you need to have an editorial plan and assign beats, says PR Newswire‘s Victoria Harres in this interview with Women Centric’s Pattie Simone, which was filmed at TWTRCON NY 10 last June. PR Newswire has two main business goals for managing its presence on Twitter:

Accessibility: PR Newswire uses Twitter to make itself more accessible to its global client base. Harres and her team funnel messages and inquiries to the right team member–sales, customer service, tech support–for fast response.

Branding: Harres explains that “being the voice behind the brand” is a great responsibility, since she and her team are speaking for everyone at the company and want to make sure that how they represent the brand would make the entire team proud.

The real learning in this interview is when Harres shares her strategy for managing time and responsibility among the 4-member team. By having each team member focus on a different “content beat,” the team naturally focuses on various audience segments. Watch as Harres discusses how the team uses content to drive its targeting strategy:

A few weeks ago, the Managing Automation management and editorial team asked us to help them brush up on their Twitter skills. We put together a slide deck to help us walk them through the basics (some of the participants were complete newbies), and created an analysis of how their brand was doing on Twitter when compared to others in their industry. We received terrific feedback on the session; everyone told us they learned a lot– and that it was very practical.

In fact, their production director, Reggie Rios (@riosreggie), emailed me a few days ago to say that they especially like the checklists we had at the end of the deck. As Reggie said, “If you follow it you see results.”

We’ve posted the checklists up on our brand new Slideshare account* and are sharing them here. Feel free to use them, suggest improvements, and share them with any Twitter newbies in your life!

We are eight weeks away from TWTRCON SF! Our early bird discount expires at the end of this week, and we need your help getting out the word!

To make sure that as many people as possible hear about TWTRCON SF before the early bird rates expire at the end of the week, we are asking you to help us tweet about the event. To thank you, one tweet sent on Tuesday 9/21 with the phrase “#TWTRCON Tuesday” will be randomly selected to win a free pass to TWTRCON SF.

One basic way agencies can demonstrate digital chops to a potential client? Find him or her on Twitter. That’s the lesson to be learned from JetBlue’s senior VP-marketing and commercial, Marty St. George (who will be speaking on June 14 at TWTRCON NY), who decided to test agencies currently vying for the airline’s marketing account with this tweet: “We’re pitching our advertising AOR. Curious on digital savvy … first test is how many of the agencies will find me on Twitter.” Continue reading →

Marla Erwin, Interactive Art Director for Whole Foods Market, was instrumental in creating Whole Foods’ acclaimed social media program and the results have been phenomenal! For example, in the first year,Wholefoodsgained a million Twitter followers. It has now surpassed 1.75 million people with its 150 different Twitter accounts (some are devoted to products, such as cheese or wine, for example).

The business of managed DNS (Internet Infrastructure as a Service) is anything but sexy, but the Dyn Inc. team has a group of 2,000+ passionate users following them on Twitter. The Dyn Inc. story began the same way a number of tech start-ups did — as a big idea out of a college dorm room. Since then, Dyn has thrived, in great part by leveraging social media as a springboard. Continue reading →

IBM doesn’t have a corporate Twitter ID because “we want the IBMers in aggregate to be the corporate blog and the corporate Twitter ID,” says Adam Christensen, social media communications at IBM Corporation. “We represent our brand online the way it always has been, which is employees first. Our brand is largely shaped by the interactions that they have with customers.”

Thousands of IBMers are the voice of the company. As it turns out, its decentralized social mediaapproach is another milestone in the company’s history—driving unprecedented collaboration and innovation. IBM lets employees talk—to each other and the public—without intervention. With a culture as diverse and distributed as IBM’s, getting employees to collaborate and share makes good business sense. Continue reading →